That is nice, what everyone can see is that you avoiding what I pointed out, so the point stands, Trump was incoherent there.
Having a consistent ideology=/=never being incoherent
I have news for you. Elections (here, I can’t speak for other countries) are seldom about anything more than the competition between two monolithic ideologies which change just about as quickly as government does, which is to say slower than molasses. There’s no point in rehashing the same old thing over and over again.
As for the ‘cult of celebrity’ philosophy you ascribe to me, whether you like it or not, perception is important for a President, here or in the rest of the world. Those things you think I’m being superficial about actually have importance.
Bullshit you didn’t. I can read and comprehend just as well as you can.
Ever seen Max Headroom? I’ll buy that for a dollar.
I’d look more to William Gibson than Stross. One way or the other, Stross is about 50 years late. Heinlein and Asimov and others were writing about this stuff, some even before then.
How much do you think things have changed politically since the advent of the internet? Instant information access has done nothing to alter the political landscape, except, for instance, to provide a generally safe means of communications to extremists and revolutionaries. Dirty tricks are easier, too, if you’re fool enough to make yourself vulnerable to it. If anything, that instant access has taken the place of TV’s province of pacification of the masses.
And if you’re trying to imply that I’m some kind of dinosaur left behind by the information age, you really have another think coming.
:rolleyes:
It is true that normally, ideological evolution is slow from one election cycle to the next although even then ideological distinctions between factions in the two parties are quite important. That said, there have been several election cycles (1932, 1964, 1972) where one of the major parties underwent an ideological revolution. And that is what the Republican Party is undergoing right now, where the leading candidate is threatening to withdraw from NATO, denouncing the Iraq War as based on lies, and attacking free-trade pacts as net-losses for America which no other major Republican Party candidate since at least Bob Taft has advocated.
I agree perception and personality do have some importance, hence why I wish Bernie Sanders had the persona of Donald TRUMP. That said, perception and ideology go hand in hand. Simply being a billionaire or being angry doesn’t garner you the same amount of support if your politics are otherwise essentially generic as we saw with people like Steve Forbes or Herman Cain. You need both a strong persona and a popular ideology in order to become a distinct candidate playing a major role in the election cycle.
So you don’t think the Donald has a consistent ideology, nevermind having advocated the same basic platform for the last thirty years?
I was referring to a period of time primarily, and the generation of people who came of age and grew old during that period secondarily. The ever smaller distance between people is just the backdrop. But it is illustrative that you use the Information Age, which is older than some grandparents, as your milestone.
I can imagine, with effort, an alternate universe where Joe “Droopy Dog” Lieberman represents a cult of personality while Donald J. “TRUMP” Trump does not, but it is not the one you and I inhabit.
As to the coherency you find in Trump’s worldview… you know, you’re really supposed to draw the target BEFORE you shoot at the barn, pardner.
That’s not what I meant. What I mean is that the media, our “intellectuals”, and so forth played up Lieberman as a serious politician “worthy” of election because he has a “serious tone”, was “bipartisan” etc. way while denouncing TRUMP as a fool and boor because of his “demagougery” etc.
Unsurprisingly you dismiss the strong evidence I provide in favour of the fashionable narratives of the “respectable” pundits.
Yes, because what he has demonstrated incoherence on that issue, first he blamed the Chinese, and now it is not happening at all. Until he comes forward acknowledging that global warming is real and that we have something to do with it he is just talking nonsense, and continuously.
it is not the only item were he is incoherent:
Again, I’m not arguing TRUMP has been coherent on every issue much less that he’s right on every one. To give another example, Stalin changed his views on (for example) cooperating with the Western democracies to contain the Third Reich before deciding to support the Molotov-Ribbentrorp Pact but he was always a Marxist-Leninist with his own particular views on “socialism in one country” and “intensification of the class struggle”.
Salon is a joke publication with the exception of one writer (Michael Lind) who sadly seems to have left the site now.
And now you are quoting a bunch of libertarian whiners crying that TRUMP didn’t swallow the Ayn Rand kool-aid and isn’t calling for gutting the welfare state.
Like if those were the only ones, and shooting the messenger only gives away the fact that you can not deal with the incoherence. Once again the one that is looking at unreason for talking points is you.
Incoherent indeed from Trump, and dangerously too.
Again when did I say anything about TRUMP being right? To give yet another example, Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism were not even remotely based in reality but that doesn’t mean those were actual views he had a position and was a core of his ideology.
Who is talking about Trump being right? My point was that he is incoherent. And so it stands and you were wrong. It happens. To me it is very important here to realize how it is not only the left the ones that notice that incoherence, but also many from the right.
Point being that the loose cannon nature of Trump will translate into many groups from the right also opposing Trump in the general election. Groups that are influential too, and I have trouble remembering such a situation happening in a general election.
I’ll just reduce it to some questions:
Did Adolf Hitler have a coherent ideology?
Did Josef Stalin have a coherent ideology?
Did Pol Pot have a coherent ideology?
Does Ted Cruz have a coherent ideology?
Does Donald TRUMP have a coherent ideology?
Know enough history to say that there was a bit of incoherence, after all their ideology had the seeds for the eventual dissolution of what they believed in. Cruz also has troubles in making sense.
Overall, no; there are some items were he makes sense, but they are few.
That phrase was deliberately chosen. When I was a teen I was playing with a two-digit hex computer my father and I had built from schematics in Popular Electronics. I’ve seen the majority of the evolution of this era, although if you want to be technical it really started with Alan Turing in WWII. (No, I’m not that old.)
I forgot this bit too: Trump is not only incoherent in environmental and economical matters, but also… well, just plain incoherent.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/15/3701215/donald-trump-talks-funny-2/
I guess that means that Trump will then, if he becomes president, demand the banishment of language experts.
LOL who needs doublespeak? We have Trumpspeak!